Rafael Grassi

In his works, Rafael Grassi reconciles a deep attachment to pictorial material with a taste for creating an illusion of perspective and deceptive figuration. Figures serve as a starting point that gradually decomposes, freeing itself from preconceived meanings and generating a pictorial surface full of paradoxes and chromatic diversity.

Formal analogies, paradoxes, and linguistic contaminations are some of the notions evoked in his painting. Photographic images act as an initial reference, triggering a process of successive manipulation and metamorphosis that preserves the trace of a decaying image. In this transformation, formerly narrative elements emancipate themselves on the canvas, reclaiming an autonomy freed from meaning.

Grassi holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid. Since the 1990s, he has exhibited in galleries and art centers across France, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. His solo exhibitions have taken place in institutions such as the Centre d’Art de Dompierre, the Fond d’Art Contemporain de Montluçon, the Colegio de España in Paris, Palazzo Mezzabarba in Pavia, and the Valérie Larbaud Cultural Center in Vichy.

His works are part of collections such as Fundació Banc Sabadell, Fundació La Caixa, Olor Visual, the Italian Ministry of Culture, FRAC Auvergne, Collection Passimessa Clermont-Ferrand, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Collection Municipale d’Art Contemporain de Vitry-sur-Seine, the Contemporary Art Collection of the Canton of Zurich, the Peter Nobel Collection, the PRISA Collection, and the Helga de Alvear Collection.